Niebuhr, Reinhold

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Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892–1971). Christian theologian, reflecting especially on social and political issues. After twenty-three years in a Detroit working-class church, he moved to Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he became professor of Christian ethics, remaining there until his retirement. Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) already anticipated his Gifford Lectures, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941–3). What he looked for was ‘a combination of moral resoluteness about the immediate issues with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgement’, thereby grounding politics in realism about human frailty.

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